9 Scary-Ass Books You Can Read This Halloween

Halloween is almost here, which means houses are covered in cotton spiderwebs, pumpkin spice haunts every dish, and you can take a break from the horrors of your Twitter timeline with a spooky tale. Horror movies are great, but there’s nothing as scary as your imagination. Your mind creates monsters freakier than any CGI. Here are nine of the best spooky books to keep you up late at night.

The Haunting of Hill House

Shirley Jackson

Shirley Jackson is best known for publishing a short story in The New Yorker that was so shocking readers canceled subscriptions and flooded the offices with angry letters. “The Lottery” is a masterpiece, but not Jackson’s only one. All fans of things that go bump in the night should read The Haunting of Hill House, a genre-defining haunted house novel that might be the spookiest ghost story ever written.

The Hot Zone

Richard Preston

I don’t know if truth is stranger than fiction, but it can sure as hell be scarier. I read Stephen King and Anne Rice as a teenager, but nothing freaked me out as much as Preston’s nonfiction thriller about ebola and other organ-melting, blood-vomit-inducing viruses. The ebola virus—which just had another horrifying and tragic outbreak in West Africa three years ago—kills up to 90% of the humans who get infected. Preston vividly describes how the virus slowly dissolves your insides and, after killing you, makes your body “bleed out” of your available orifices. No gory horror film stacks up to the terror of the real thing.

The Handmaid’s Tale

Margaret Atwood

Like The Hot Zone, here is another nonfiction book that’s as scary as any novel. Okay, The Handmaid’s Tale isn’t really nonfiction, but Atwood’s dystopian novel about a misogynist right wing government taking over the United States feels a little too close for comfort in 2017. After an extremist Christian militia kills much of the federal government, they form the theocratic and militaristic Republic of Gilead. Women’s rights are stripped away and gay people are killed. Some women, called handmaids, are forced into reproductive servitude. Atwood’s novel was published in 1986, and has sadly stayed relevant. This year’s Hulu adaptation, starring Elisabeth Moss, is well worth watching, but the novel is is a must read.

Revenge

Yoko Ogawa

Subtitled “Eleven Dark Tales,” Ogawa’s Revenge is a masterful collection of contemporary Japanese Gothic. These tales are more creepy than gory, taking our reality and twisting it just a few degrees off. In one of the best stories, “Old Mrs J.,” a woman’s neighbor starts growing bizarre carrots that are shaped exactly like human hands. The stories here are inter-linked, forming a dark portrait of modern life.

Books of Blood

Clive Barker

All horror fans know Clive Barker from directing the classic S&M hell demon film Hellraiser, but not enough of them have read his fantastically creepy fiction. Hailed by Stephen King as “the future of horror” in the 1980s, Barker has build up a bloody bibliography of creepy tales. The best is his six volumes of stories, the Books of Blood. My favorite story, “In the Hills, the Cities,” features two European cities that have an tradition of strapping all the townsfolk together into massive human monsters. Twisted tales from a twisted mind.

Her Body and Other Parties

Carmen Maria Machado

The most recent book on this list, Machado’s debut story collection is genre-defying collection of delightfully bizarre tales. These are twisted fables, where real world traumas mingle with supernatural powers. While deeply informed by fairy tales, Machado bends stories into new shapes—even literally as in the phenomenal “Especially Heinous” written as 272 capsule reviews of every episode of Law & Order: SVU. Machado’s stories are spooky, but also joyful. The kind of scary stories that leave you full of life.

The Best of Richard Matheson

Richard Matheson

Even if you’ve never heard Matheson’s name, you probably know his work. Matheson wrote over a dozen episodes of The Twilight Zone, including perhaps the most celebrated episode, “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet.” He also wrote the classic horror novels I Am Legend and Hell House, and in general helped define and popularize the creepy tale. As Victor LaValle—himself a terrific horror writer—says in the introduction to this collection, “When you are reading modern horror, you are still reading Richard Matheson.” Matheson’s work mixes horror, science fiction, and fantasy, with the stories here spinning tales out of haunted killer dolls, giggling teenage witches, and other horrors both familiar and strange.

Beloved

Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison’s Beloved is one of the most celebrated literary novels of the last half century. In won the Pulitzer Prize in 1988, paved the way for Morrison’s Nobel Prize in 1993, and was voted the best work of American fiction written between 1981 and 2006 by a New York Times panel. It is also a horror novel. Beloved tackles the horrors of slavery in America, and also utilizes tropes of the horror genre. The main character Sethe is haunted by the ghost of the child she mercy killed to escape slavery. Beloved is a heartbreaking and haunting work, and proof enough that horror fiction can be art.

Night Shift

Stephen King

An ancient prophecy written by an alcoholic author stand-in says that if you don’t include a Stephen King book on every scary book list you’ll be eaten alive by demon clowns in a small New England town. Stephen King’s novels are so famous that they don’t need a plug from me, which is why I’m going to pick King’s first collection of short stories, Night Shift. King’s novels are often gigantic tomes, but his stories are taught little horror gems. The twenty stories here include evil rural children, monstrous rats, creepy New England towns, and everything else you’ve come to know and love from Stephen King.